Webmaster Tools Part - II | Yahoo Webmaster Tools

Yahoo Webmaster Tools

Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN)

Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) is the answer of Yahoo to Google Adsense.
Ever since Google AdSense opened up possibility to earn money as a web publisher, contextual advertising has assumed significance. Until a few years ago, banner ads were more favored. Google Adsense wasn't around, and often odds were against small businesses to place ads and get noticed. Over time, banner ads became less preferable mainly because web viewers increasingly considered them as major distractions.

Contextual advertising - what it means?

Contextual advertising means ads that are given on the page on the basis of their relevancy to the content of a webpage in which they appear. For example, if a viewer visits a page on leather shoes then person would be interested in gaining information on leather made products only so it would be wise to show ads on leather made products or something of that sort that will attract the visitors.


YPN versus Google AdSense

Though it is quite early to compare between the two, especially since YPN, as it is yet to debut internationally. Going through user experience, forums feedback and all the most important point that crops up in ones mind is YPN's generous EPC. Google AdSense is more superior and popular in ad targeting which means more click-through-rate (CTR). Ad links are shown in Google AdSense, not so in YPN. On the other hand, while YPN displays link title to show the full ad text, Google AdSense does not.

In addition to text ads, Google AdSense also allows image ads in the same format as text displays. There is however no way to know from ad statistics as to how image ads perform vis-à-vis text ads. Though necessarily contextual advertising, image ads still are a throwback to old days of banner ads. YPN does not show image ads.

According to user experience, there is no doubt that contextual advertising is here to stay. As YPN evolves further, the choice between it and Google AdSense can be expected to narrow down.


Yahoo Site Explorer

Site Explorer allows the Webmaster or the user to check all the web pages indexed by Yahoo! Search. You can view the most popular pages from your site, check into the comprehensive site map, and verify the link to the site or to that page.

This new tool just like Google Sitemap was designed to promote feedback between webmasters and Yahoo search staff members.

Yahoo! Site Explorer provided a central interface for the following:

· It list all sub pages of a site domain (domain.com) or path (domain.com/~yourname)
· Check Backlinks (or in links as Yahoo calls them) for both site domains and paths.
· Free submission of sites not indexed yet by Yahoo. Submissions can be done either one at a time or by bulk. The bulk method requires that you identify the location (URL) of an online text file with the list of URLs to be submitted.

1. Benefit from their Work: You can now check your competitor’s site and their backlinks. Analyze them as to which of them would be useful to you and then ask those webmasters to link to your site and how their site will be benefited by this plan. This is a great method for in-house link building.

2. Advertising Revealed: Check for the list of advertisers who had given a link to your competitor site. This way you can have an overview of the advertising rates and the campaigns that your competitor follows.

3. Forums and Blogs: These have become one of the best ideas to gain popularity within a short span of time. Forums and blog links are considered to be the easiest means of getting links but then it has to be remembered how much do search engines give importance to them.

Summary

Yahoo’s Site Explorer tool may not be as competitive as compared to Google but still it has features that help to do a research. Queries like (site, link, cache provide a little bit of information).

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